As marketing channels continue to fragment, finding new ways to engage with customers becomes increasingly difficult. By building customer incentives, companies can nurture the Holy Grail and ultimate target of any marketing practice; customer loyalty. This article will outline just a few ideas that can be adapted to just about any product or service, and how you can go about starting your own scheme.

Steps

1

Develop a Successful Loyalty Card Marketing Strategy|Use loyalty cards]]. Loyalty cards and programs are one of the most used marketing incentive methods and are a great way to encourage customer loyalty to your product or service. They are usually used by the retail sector, yet can be adapted to almost any service. They are also a useful tool in market research, and can be used to determine customer buying behaviour, ascertaining the most popular products or services.

Starting a loyalty card scheme is not too difficult. You can either choose to use a specialist marketing agency who will organise everything for you, or you could do it yourself. If you want to do it yourself, all you will need is to have a number of cardboard cards printed and cut from a design agency. Then, you can either sign the card every time a customer comes in and makes a purchase, or have a custom stamp made to imprint upon the card. All it takes is a little bit of groundwork and investment, and you could have a loyalty scheme up and running in only a few days.

If you do not want to go the route of a physical card, you can have a customer’s details on a database, and simply update it there, although this does not do much for your branding and customer awareness.

2

Try competitions. This is another popular method of incentive marketing. Competitions can entice consumers to purchase products in the hopes of winning prizes, products and other benefits. Competitions can take many forms, either through the use of instant wins within products themselves, or inviting purchases to enter codes found on the products on the company website. This method is more popular as it doubles as a method of data gathering on customers and paves the way for direct mail and email campaigns with further offers.

Implementing a competition can be quite difficult as you need to ensure that you can deliver the prize as promised. If you are a larger business, you can have a digital marketing company; they can implement a platform on your website and get the word out there. If you are a smaller business, you will most likely promote the competition yourself, either on your website, or through notices in your shop. It is important that you can fulfill your prize obligation, so make sure that you can actually deliver what you advertise.

3

Use product promotions. Another form of short term incentive, promotions are more easily managed and implemented than some other forms of customer incentive processes. In fact, they are so common that they are expected whenever walking into any retail store, usually at the front where everyone can see it. Supermarkets are the biggest users of promotional marketing, with multiple products on offer simultaneously, usually offering incentives such as two for one, buy one get one free and so on.

Companies that often have promotions on offer usually enjoy some form of customer retention as there is always something on offer, and this attracts customers to visit the premises more often. The problem with this is that promotions can sometime devalue the perceived value of a product, making it appear as though they are just trying to get rid of surplus stock, or the product is of lesser quality.

Promotions are easy to do, whatever the size of your business. It is as simple as finding out what products you may have in surplus, or which ones you can afford to let go as part of a special offer. Advertising your promotion can be as easy as printing out an A4 sheet of paper and sticking it to your shop window, or at the product shelf.

4

Throw an event. Events are usually utilized by larger businesses, but are being increasingly used by smaller enterprises to raise awareness of brands and show consumers that they are willing to engage with them in return for their attention together with the objective of increasing exposure and market share.

Depending on the scale of the event, companies often make use of specialist agencies to handle the services, as there are many things which need to be catered for such as food, venue, staff and other technical and logistical necessities.

If you want to set up an event, you will need to consider several things. Firstly, where can you hold it? If you explore your local area you will undoubtedly find some kind of community centre or hotel where they provide for hosted events. In the case of the hotel, they will most likely offer catering for the event, which can be useful as you will not have to find an external catering service which could be expense.

To get people to go to your event, advertise in-store, on your website and through various social platforms. It is important that you give people a reason to come, such as free gifts related to your service or product, entertainment (which would involve the hiring of said entertainment) or through using a platform such as ‘help your local businesses’.